HP Good Tank 5101
MSRP $250.00
“The HP Good Tank 5101 has its strengths, however suffers from software program points and cost-cutting measures.”
Execs
- Extraordinarily low price per web page
- Two-year provide of ink included
- Picture prints look good on plain paper
- Scanner is quick with good high quality
- Optical character recognition works reliably
Cons
- Critical cell app bugs on iPhone
- Tiny icon LCD and buttons are complicated
- Faint strains in shiny prints
- Paper jams are tough to clear
HP’s Good Tank 5101 is a compact all-in-one printer that comes with sufficient ink to final for a 12 months or longer. That’s the beauty of tank printers — They remove the continuing must order new cartridges. For the reason that Good Tank 5101 features a scanner, it could serve a number of functions on your house workplace, together with copying, scanning, and printing.
HP is a dependable model, however not all printers are equal. You need a tried-and-true printer that’s not too costly to run and that’s appropriate with all of your gadgets. And in my testing, the Good Tank 5101 simply has just a few too many issues in comparison with the competitors.
Design
HP’s Good Tank 5101 is a nice-looking printer. The off-white sides and grey lid have properly rounded corners. On the decrease left, 4 translucent home windows present the degrees for the black, cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. Like most tank printers, the colour doesn’t present via, however HP added a coloration stripe to every tank that matches the colour inside. It’s a pleasant contact for visible affirmation of which ink is low on the uncommon event that occurs.
The output bin is within the entrance, and a intelligent rotating arm unfolds to catch your prints. A 100-sheet paper tray is within the again, extending the depth of the printer.
With all trays open, the HP Good Tank 5101 has a footprint of 17.1 inches huge by 22.9 inches deep. There’s no automated doc feeder (ADF), and the peak is a brief 11 inches, even with paper within the tray. If that you must copy multipage paperwork, it’s best to take a look at our checklist of one of the best all-in-one printers.
The show is a bit uncommon. It’s a 1.2-inch icon show, which is strictly what it seems like. It’s not terribly helpful to see icons on an LCD when there are additionally icons in LED lights and buttons under that display. The lack of awareness is disheartening when issues come up.
Printing efficiency
The Good Tank 5101 has surprisingly good photograph print high quality on plain paper, as HP claims. That’s necessary in order for you low-cost coloration. Even when ink is cheap, the price of letter-size shiny photograph paper is about 20 cents per sheet.
The crisp high quality and brightness that you just get with photograph paper are definitely worth the expense on your greatest footage, however on a regular basis pictures and paperwork will probably be way more reasonably priced in the event you can print them on plain paper.
It’s no shock that the HP Good Tank 5101 prints vivid, sharp footage on photograph paper, although colours are a bit muted. It could possibly’t match the dynamic vary of a six-color printer just like the Epson EcoTank 8500, however HP designed the Good Tank 5101 to fill the wants of households.
Borderless printing works effectively, however I can discover faint strains within the shiny prints if I look intently. That may very well be on account of a nasty paper jam I skilled on the primary print. Clearing this paper jam required an uncommon and important quantity of effort, together with disconnecting the printheads and flipping the printer on its face to tug paper from a backside hatch. After working printhead alignment a number of instances, the strains continued.
Printing black-and-white paperwork and labels is fast. HP charges the Good Tank 5101 at 12 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome, nevertheless it slows to five ppm (12 seconds per web page) for a median coloration doc.
That’s slower than most price range printers, and HP’s costs are within the low to midrange. For instance, Brother’s cheap, tank-like MFC-J1205W printer averages a speedy 9 ppm for coloration paperwork.
Particular options
The HP Good Tank 5101 is an all-in-one, so it contains scanning and copying features. It takes a while to determine how you can copy. I’d develop muscle reminiscence for the controls after a while, however the printer’s management panel is unintuitive.
Copying works effectively normally. The scanner is quick and has good high quality. When making a number of copies of the identical authentic, you possibly can output 10 ppm in monochrome and a couple of ppm in coloration.
Most paperwork have margins and scan effectively. After I tried a handwritten web page that went proper to the sting, the scan reduce off the suitable edge. I attempted once more, aligning it fastidiously, however the facet was lacking once more. Canon’s PIXMA G4270 MegaTank appears extra dependable, nevertheless it had an analogous drawback when copying paperwork with slim margins. I believe a full-page scanner ought to copy the complete web page.
HP’s software program contains choices for multi-photo scanning and optical character recognition. OCR works effectively, suggesting the HP Good app has been improved since I reviewed the HP Envy Encourage 7955e, which suffered from some software program points. The multi-photo scan appears to be unreliable, nevertheless. It failed to acknowledge separate footage when scanning.
Software program and compatibility
For the reason that Good Tank 5101 lacks a correct display, setup is greatest carried out with the HP Good app. Be sure you are logged right into a community that helps 2.4GHz for the reason that printer requires that. It took me a few tries earlier than getting related, nevertheless it wasn’t too fussy.
HP contains 4 full bottles of ink with the Good Tank 5101, and I used to be ready to spend a couple of minutes ready for them to empty into their respective chambers. However in just some seconds, every massive bottle was completed. Regardless of the free-flowing ink, there have been no spills. HP designed the bottles and tanks very effectively.
Printheads should be put in, which is a fast, however uncommon step for a tank printer. Subsequent, I began printhead alignment, which was refreshingly easy. HP simplifies the method by printing a single sheet that I switch to the scanner for automated adjustment. On paper, this sounds good, however I did have a difficulty with faint strains.
With an inkjet printer, I normally begin testing with a photograph from my iPhone. I instantly skilled an issue. The HP Good app didn’t present the right paper sizes. There was no choice to decide on letter-size paper, and it defaulted to three.5 x 5 photograph paper. The paper measurement choices contained A4 and some different European paper sizes.
I’m in Canada, so maybe that was a part of the issue, however we use the identical paper because the U.S. I’ve examined loads of HP printers with out encountering this drawback. There have been just a few different printing points associated to the HP Good app, however I gained’t belabor the purpose.
HP assist offered a workaround for my main concern. If I exploit Apple AirPrint reasonably than the HP Good app, the right paper sizes seem. That limits the choices obtainable since AirPrint is a generic driver, whereas the HP app ought to provide one of the best assist of its printer’s options. HP is conscious of the issue and is engaged on an answer.
All the pieces labored usually from my Home windows PC, Mac, and Android cellphone. Nevertheless, a big portion of the inhabitants owns an iPhone, so it’s a notable challenge.
Preliminary price vs. long-term worth
The HP Good Tank 5101 is cheap for an inkjet tank printer. Nonetheless, $250 might sound costly in comparison with inkjets that promote for about $100. Nevertheless, the price disappears over time. That is for 2 causes.
First, HP contains 4 full bottles of ink, offering 6,000 monochrome pages and eight,000 coloration pages. HP estimates this may final for as much as two years. I didn’t see the extent drop regardless of voluminous printing. Second, the price of ink is extremely low.
Whereas cartridge-based printers like Epson’s Expression Premium XP-7100 have a cost-per-page (cpp) as excessive as 16 cents only for the ink, the Good Tank 5101 averages simply six-tenths of a cent per coloration doc. Black-and-white pages price about half that.
Contemplating I loved first rate photograph high quality whereas utilizing plain paper, the HP Good Tank 5101 gives remarkably low working prices for coloration in addition to black-and-white.
Is that this the printer for you?
The HP Good Tank 5101 is a printer with plenty of potential. Sadly, software program issues and some cost-cutting measures, just like the tiny icon show, are holding it again.
Correcting the paper measurement mismatch ought to be easy. I’m hoping HP will resolve that drawback shortly. The alignment challenge may very well be harder. If it’s only a matter of correcting software program calibration, it may be a straightforward repair. If it’s the results of harm triggered whereas clearing a paper jam, that’s unlucky as a result of jams occur typically.
If HP can right issues with software program fixes, I’ll replace the assessment accordingly. For now, I’m docking some factors from the Good Tank 5101’s rating. If you’ll find the Good Tank 5101 on low cost, it’d do you effectively sufficient, however for now, there are higher, extra reasonably priced all-one-printers on the market that will be a greater purchase.
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